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Due to recent events, I thought I would share a blog post I wrote a while back on how to add Veeam Recovery ISO to Window’s Boot Menu. This helped us tremendously during the CS outage to quickly gain access to our DC’s.

 

 

 

Veeam Agent Recovery Media Boot Integration

 

During the last Veeam Vanguard/Veeam 100 summit in Prague, Czech Republic part of the summit was “Fun field facts” where attendees presented various topics they found useful for sharing. I presented on how to integrate Veeam Agent into Windows. This will be a short follow-up post on how to incorporate the Veeam Agent Recovery Media into Windows Boot Manager.

I started my presentation in Prague with “When it rains, it pours…” and, after being in IT for many years now, that is what happens. Just like Murphey’s Law; so imagine this, you have a physical workload backed up with Veeam (great), and the OS crashes. You need to restore to bare metal as fast as possible. But now you need to create the recovery media first, boot up the server with a USB drive (need to be physically present); all this can cost valuable time that could be used better to actually do the restore.

A better way is to integrate the recovery media directly into Windows Boot Manager. If you have a KVM, you don’t even need to be at the Datacenter to restore. Integration is surprisingly straightforward and will work with UEFI Bios of course. I don’t think this will work with secure boot though, so you would have to deactivate this first.

Let’s do it.

First great an ISO with Veeam Agent Recovery Media, including all specific drivers and network configuration needed. This will ensure we don’t even have to worry about re-iping the server or any drive issues. NIC and Storage drives should be working out of the box. In case of a more unique hardware configuration, this is the time to load additional drivers into the package.

Next, let’s create a new partition on the server. We will copy the content of the ISO there; it does not need to be very large.

1 GB partition is large enough for us here

Give it a letter and unpack the ISO into it so it looks like this:

Next, we will integrate it into Windows Boot Manager. I used EasyBCD, but you could use BCDEdit command line as well

Type is Windows and point it to the drive where we unpacked the Veeam Recovery Manager and the boot.wim under /sources. The entry should look like this:

That’s it. Now you can quickly boot into Veeam Recovery and restore the OS. No need to re-ip the machine or get a usb drive connected!

 

Posted here (https://nicostein.com/veeam-agent-recovery-media-boot-integration/)

Really like this article Nico.  I am going to test it out in my lab and see how it goes.  I did bookmark it to follow.  Thanks for sharing it here for the wider community.  👍🏼

Oh yeah...forgot about this. Thanks for the reminder Nico!

Thanks @NicBackup !
Many Vusers will appreciate this post !

Wow, very cool idea. Thanks @NicBackup for this guide. Will definitly check this out in my lab and propose to my customers as well. 

Quick update, if you run into an issue with EasyBCD in your home lab requiring a license for servers, look for version 2.3, not 2.4 (it can be found on the internets). 2.3 works just as well, but does not check.

 

Really like this article Nico.  I am going to test it out in my lab and see how it goes.  I did bookmark it to follow.  Thanks for sharing it here for the wider community.  👍🏼

Thanks Chris!

I love that you had done this and appreciate you posting it.  It sounds so incredibly simple, but I didn’t realize just how simple this actually is.  The only issue I see is that since that partition is sitting behind the C: drive, you wouldn’t be able to expand the C: drive down the road, so make sure things are big enough for the future if you’re going to add another partition.  I will not that I think if you convert to dynamic disks, you can create another partition and span the volume across them, but I would like to avoid thinking about such nonsense….

Anyhow, great post!

I love that you had done this and appreciate you posting it.  It sounds so incredibly simple, but I didn’t realize just how simple this actually is.  The only issue I see is that since that partition is sitting behind the C: drive, you wouldn’t be able to expand the C: drive down the road, so make sure things are big enough for the future if you’re going to add another partition.  I will not that I think if you convert to dynamic disks, you can create another partition and span the volume across them, but I would like to avoid thinking about such nonsense….

Anyhow, great post!

Thanks, so I tested some different ways in my homelab. You actually don’t have to create a partition if you don’t want to. You can put the iso or unpacked boot.wim image in any folder on your disk (like c:) and point the boot menu entry to that location. That worked as well for me.

I think I will update the post tomorrow, since it’s been a while I wrote this.

I love that you had done this and appreciate you posting it.  It sounds so incredibly simple, but I didn’t realize just how simple this actually is.  The only issue I see is that since that partition is sitting behind the C: drive, you wouldn’t be able to expand the C: drive down the road, so make sure things are big enough for the future if you’re going to add another partition.  I will not that I think if you convert to dynamic disks, you can create another partition and span the volume across them, but I would like to avoid thinking about such nonsense….

Anyhow, great post!

Thanks, so I tested some different ways in my homelab. You actually don’t have to create a partition if you don’t want to. You can put the iso or unpacked boot.wim image in any folder on your disk (like c:) and point the boot menu entry to that location. That worked as well for me.

I think I will update the post tomorrow, since it’s been a while I wrote this.

I was just thinking that it could probably be on another virtual disk or something like that, but I try not to mess around with the partitions and bcdedit too often...usually only when required.  😁

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